In the present state of the art, a conventional network management system may use a Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Packet Internet Groper (PING) utility for performing auto-discovery of network elements. This method is not an efficient process because unnecessary traffic is introduced to the entire network when the network management station periodically transmits messages to all network elements in all the subnets.
Other conventional methods, such as SNMP trap-based discovery, require that the IP address of the network management station be known to the network elements. A shortcoming of such conventional methods is that, if a particular network element fails, the network management station has no means of detecting that the failure has occurred unless the management station polls the devices at specific intervals. In addition, the SNMP trap-based approach tends to be an inefficient method.
What is needed is an improved method for discovering network resources, and for automatically ascertaining when a particular network resource may have failed.